Cyber weapon goes into battle

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

A New Zealand-developed software tool that detects and prevents distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks will be showcased to the world's military top brass.

Esphion chief executive officer Jonathan Cates said his company's netDeFlect package had been selected to be presented as a cyber war defence solution at the Joint Warrior Inter-operability Demonstration (JWID) in April.

The annual virtual event is sponsored by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The event is a forum for evolving technologies that solve command, control, communications, computers and intelligence issues.

Lieutenant-Commander Iain Shearer, assistant director of command and control at the New Zealand Defence Force, hopes the event will give Esphion exposure to the world's military as well as local defence forces and the Government.

"JWID is an opportunity for companies to show their products in a setting that means more to military warfighters than trade shows. It puts them more in an operational context."

Mr Cates said that even in its development stage, netDeFlect had caught the eye of overseas cyber defence agencies, including the US Defence Information Systems Agency.

As far as he was aware it was the only product capable of stopping DDOS attacks.

Such attacks crippled networks by flooding servers with spurious commands.

"If you look at the world market we are right on the edge. There have been no reports of a software vendor's product dropping an attack.

"Until now the only defence has been to add more resources."

NetDeFlect is being beta tested at several bank, ISP and telco test sites in New Zealand, but Mr Cates said the first version for sale would be released either next month or in April.

The price of the package would depend on the number of deployed sites and the size of the telecommunication connections protected.

"In an average-sized site in this part of the world, you're looking at $US30,000 to $US80,000 [$71,670 to $191,145]," he said.

Mr Cates said Esphion, a 20-employee company based at Massey University, was poised to earn revenue for the first time.

Last year Esphion, then known as JDS, received money from the Stephen Tindall-backed New Zealand Seed Fund.

Mr Cates said he was talking to local and overseas investors to raise "seven figure" second-round finance.

The money would pay for development of further tools to analyse and control network traffic.

It was planned to market these tools as standalone packages as well as controller modules for routers.

Esphion chief technology officer Juergen Brendel said the threat posed by DDOS attacks - occurring at a rate of 4000 to 5000 a week - should not be underestimated.

New Zealand was especially vulnerable as the total bandwidth connecting the country to the outside world was just a fraction of the bandwidth available to US sites such as Yahoo, which had been shut down by past attacks.

"One of these days, New Zealand is going to be taken out," he said.

Mr Brendel said netDeFlect detected DDOS attacks by statistical analysis, including monitoring the ratio of incoming and outgoing traffic and its type.

For example, if a server was sending out a large number of "hello" commands without receiving the corresponding "goodbyes", this could indicate it was the target of a flooding attack.